Ãcariya Mun was
a teacher whose unique mode of practice will never
be forgotten by those of us who were closely
associated with him. Many such senior disciples of
his are still alive today. Each ãcariya differs
somewhat in his inherent virtuous qualities, his
specific mode of practice, and the special kinds of
knowledge and understanding he has attained as a
result. Earlier on I mentioned some of these
ãcariyas by name; but there are many others whose
names were not identified. Nonetheless, it was
always my intention to identify one of his senior
disciples in particular, once the story of Ãcariya
Mun’s life was completed, so that the reader could
learn something of the way he practiced, the
experiences he encountered, and the insights he
gained. Ãcariya Mun’s disciples followed in his
footsteps much in the same manner that the Lord
Buddha’s Arahant disciples followed in his,
experiencing many difficulties along the way before
ultimately attaining the same knowledge and
understanding that their teacher had before them.
The extent to which these monks met with
spine-tingling, frightening situations in their
practice environment depended largely on the nature
of the places where they lived and traveled.

This brings me to one senior disciple
of Ãcariya Mun for whom I have a great amount of
respect. Since this ãcariya’s dhutanga experiences
are quite different from most of his contemporaries,
I would like to present here some episodes from his
practice as evidence of the possibility that some of
the unusual external phenomena commonly reported at
the time of the Buddha may still exist today.
Certain incidents in the life of the Buddha – like
the elephant who gave him protection and the monkey
who offered him honeycomb – may have their
modern-day parallels in some of this acariya’s
experiences. To demonstrate the authenticity of the
episodes I’m about to relate, I shall identify him
by name. He is Ãcariya Chob who, having been
ordained as a monk for many years, is now about 70
years old. He has always preferred living in remote
forest and mountain areas and still does so to this
day. Since he likes to trek through such wilderness
areas at night, he’s constantly encountering
nocturnal creatures like wild tigers.

Leaving Lomsak in Phetchabun province
one afternoon, he started trekking north toward
Lampang in the province of Chiang Mai. As he was
about to enter a large tract of forest, he met with
some local villagers who advised him, with obvious
concern, to spend the night near their village and
then continue on the next morning. They warned him
that the forest he was about to enter was vast, so
there was no way someone entering it in the
afternoon could get through to the other side before
dark. Those who ended up stranded in this forest
after dark invariably became food for the huge
tigers that roamed there at night. Since it was
already afternoon, he had no chance to hike through
it in time. Once darkness fell, the tigers began
roaming around looking for something to eat, and
they considered any person that they happened on as
just another source of food. Since no one ever
escaped from them alive, the villagers were fearful
that Ãcariya Chob would meet the same fate. It was
already well after noon, so they did not want him to
enter the forest. They told him that a notice had
been posted, warning travelers about this ‘forest of
yakkhas’ to keep them from being eaten by those
monsters. Being curious, Ãcariya Chob asked what
yakkhas they were talking about. He had read old
accounts about such creatures but had never actually
seen one. They told him that it was just their way
of referring to those huge, striped tigers who
devoured anyone failing to make it through the
forest by nightfall. They invited him to return with
them to their village and spend the night there. He
could then have a meal the next morning and continue
on his journey.

Telling them that he intended to
continue walking anyway, Ãcariya Chob refused to
return to the village. Concerned for his safety,
they insisted that, no matter how fast he walked, by
having started this late in the day he could not
possibly reach the other side before nightfall and
would end up stranded in the middle of that vast
forest. But, determined to press ahead, he refused
to be deterred. They asked him if he was afraid of
tigers. He acknowledged that he was but said it was
irrelevant: he intended to go in any case. They
insisted that the tigers there never ran away from
people. If he encountered one, he was sure to lose
his life. If he wanted to avoid being attacked by
man-eating tigers, he should wait until morning to
proceed further. He replied that should his kamma
dictate that he was destined to be eaten by tigers,
then that’s the way it would be. If, however, he was
destined to continue living, then the tigers
wouldn’t trouble him.

Taking leave of the villagers,
Ãcariya Chob resumed his journey, feeling no qualms
about dying. No sooner had he begun to enter the
forest than he noticed that both sides of the trail
he was on were covered with claw prints, where
tigers had been scratching in the earth.
He saw piles of
tiger scat scattered all along the trail –
some of it old, some of it quite fresh. As he walked
along doing meditation practice, he observed these
telltale signs, but he wasn’t afraid. By the time he
had reached the very middle of the forest, darkness
had closed in all around him.

Suddenly, he heard the roar of a huge
tiger coming up behind him, followed by the roar of
another huge tiger moving toward him, both calling
out to each other as they quickly closed in on him.
The roaring sounds from both directions grew closer
and louder until suddenly both tigers emerged from
the darkness at the same moment – one, merely six
feet in front of him and the other a mere six feet
behind. The sound of their roars had become
deafening. Seeing the gravity of the situation,
Ãcariya Chob stood transfixed in the middle of the
trail. He saw that the tiger in front of him was
crouched and ready to pounce. Glancing behind him,
he saw that the tiger there, too, was crouched and
ready to pounce. Fear arose in him then, for he was
sure that this signaled the end of his life.
Petrified with fear, he stood stock-still, rooted to
the spot. But his mindfulness remained strong, so he
concentrated his mind intently, and that prevented
him from panicking. Even though he might be killed
by those tigers, he would not allow his mind to
falter. With that resolve, he turned the focus of
his attention away from the tigers and back within
himself, thus excluding everything external from his
awareness. At that moment, his citta ‘converged’,
dropping quickly into a deep state of samãdhi. As
this occurred, the knowledge arose in him that the
tigers could not possibly harm him. After that,
everything in the world simply vanished, including
himself and the tigers. Experiencing no physical
sensations whatsoever, he was totally unaware of
what then happened to his body. All awareness of the
external world, including his physical presence, had
utterly disappeared. Which meant that awareness of
the tigers had also disappeared. His citta had
‘converged’ completely, dropping to the very base of
samãdhi, and many hours passed before it withdrew
from that state.

When his citta finally withdrew, he
found that he was still standing in the same
position as before. His umbrella and alms bowl were
still slung over his shoulder, and in one hand he
still carried a candle lantern, which had long since
gone out. So he lit another candle and looked around
for the tigers; but they were nowhere to be found.
He had no idea where they had disappeared to.

Withdrawing from samãdhi that night,
he felt no fear whatsoever. His heart was full of
such remarkable courage that even if hundreds of
tigers appeared at that moment, he would have
remained completely unperturbed; for, he had seen
with absolute clarity the extraordinary power of the
citta. He felt amazed to have escaped the gaping
jaws of those two tigers – a sense of amazement
defying description. Standing there alone in the
forest, Ãcariya Chob was suddenly overcome by a
feeling of compassionate affection for the two
tigers. In his mind they became friends who, having
provided him with a lesson in Dhamma, then
miraculously disappeared. He no longer feared them –
in fact, he actually missed them.

Ãcariya Chob
described both tigers as being enormous: each was
about the size of a racehorse, though its body
length well exceeded that of a horse. Their heads
would easily have measured sixteen inches from ear
to ear. He had never in his life seen tigers that
were so grotesquely large. Consequently, when he
first saw them he stood petrified, stiff as a
corpse. Fortunately, his mindfulness remained strong
throughout. Later, after his citta had withdrawn
from samãdhi, he felt joyful and serene. He knew
then that he could go wherever he wished without
fearing anything in the world. Believing
wholeheartedly that the citta, when fully integrated
with Dhamma, reigns supreme in the universe, he was
convinced that nothing could possibly harm him.

With this serene Dhamma filling his
heart, he resumed his trek through the forest,
practicing walking meditation as he hiked along. His
two tiger friends were still fresh in his mind and
he often thought about them. He felt that, were he
to see them again, he could easily walk up and
playfully stroke their backs as if they were pets,
though it’s questionable whether they would ever
allow it.

Ãcariya Chob
walked the rest of that night in peace and solitude,
buoyed by a joyful heart. When day finally broke, he
still had not reached the end of the forest. It
wasn’t until nine o’clock that morning that he
emerged from the forest to arrive at a village
settlement. Putting down his belongings, he put on
his outer robes and walked through the village for
alms. When the inhabitants saw him entering the
village with his alms bowl, they called out to one
another to come and offer him food. Having placed
food in his bowl, some of them followed him back to
where he had left his belongings and asked where he
had come from. These being forest people who knew
the ways of the forest, when they saw him emerging
from that vast wilderness at an unusual hour, they
wanted to questioned him about it. He told them
that, having begun at the southern end, he trekked
all night through the forest without sleeping and
now intended to continue wandering north. Astounded
by this statement, they wanted to know how it was
possible, for it was common knowledge that passing
through there at night meant almost certain death in
the jaws of a tiger. How had he managed to avoid the
tigers? Had he come across no tigers during the
night? Ãcariya Chob admitted he had met some tigers,
but said he hadn’t been bothered by them. The
villagers were reluctant to believe him because the
ferocious man-eating tigers roaming that forest were
renowned for waiting to ambush anyone caught there
overnight. Only after he had explained the actual
circumstances of his encounter with the tigers did
they finally believe him, realizing that his
miraculous powers were a special case, and not
applicable to ordinary people.

Whether it is the spiritual path of
the heart or the physical path through the forest,
ignorance of the path we are on, the distances that
must be traveled, and the potential dangers along
the way are all obstacles to our progress. So we
must depend on a knowledgeable guide to ensure our
safety. We, who are journeying along the path toward
safe, happy, prosperous circumstances now and in the
future, should always keep this in mind. Just
because we’ve always thought and acted in a certain
way, we must not carelessly assume that it is
necessarily the right way. In truth, our habitual
ways of thinking and acting usually tend to be
mistaken, continuously leading most of us down the
wrong path.

DURING HIS LIFE AS a dhutanga
monk, Ãcariya Chob had many close encounters with
wild animals. Once while wandering through Burma,
he stopped to do his practice in a cave frequented
by tigers. Although these huge beasts roamed freely
through the area while he lived there, they never
harmed him. So he never dreamed that one would
actually come looking for him. But then one
afternoon at about five o’clock, as he was getting
up from his meditation, his eyes glanced up to the
mouth of the cave to see a huge, striped tiger
approaching the entrance. It was an enormous animal
and very frightening-looking; but Ãcariya Chob
remained unperturbed – probably because he was so
accustomed to seeing these creatures wherever he
went. Peering into the cave, the tiger spied him
just as he was looking up at it. Instead of showing
alarm at the sight of him or roaring out in a
terrifying manner, it just stood there passively, as
though it were a house pet. It showed no signs of
fear and made no threatening gestures. Looking
casually about, the tiger leapt onto a large, flat
rock at the entrance to the cave, about eighteen
feet from where Ãcariya Chob stood. Sitting
nonchalantly, licking its paws, it seemed
uninterested in him, though it knew perfectly well
he was in the cave. It sat there calmly with the air
of a pet dog sitting in front of the house. Growing
tired, it flopped down, stretched out its legs, and
lay there comfortably just like a pet dog,
continuing to lick itself as though feeling right at
home.

Since Ãcariya Chob’s meditation track
was right in front of the cave, he didn’t dare go
out and walk there – the proximity of the huge tiger
made him feel a bit nervous. His uneasiness was
compounded by the fact that he had never before seen
a wild tiger behave like a household pet in this
way. So he continued his sitting meditation on a
small bamboo platform inside the cave, though with
no sense of fear that the tiger might try to harm
him there. Once in a long while it casually glanced
at him in the nonchalant manner of an old friend,
while lying contentedly with no evident intention of
moving. Ãcariya Chob expected it to eventually
wander off, but it showed no interest in going
anywhere.

At first, Ãcariya Chob was sitting
outside his mosquito net; but once darkness fell he
moved inside the net and lit a candle. The tiger
remained impassive as the candlelight illuminated
the cave. It continued lying contentedly on the rock
until late into the night, when Ãcariya Chob finally
lay down to take a rest. Awaking at about three A .
M ., he lit a candle only to find the tiger
reclining impassively as before. After washing his
face, he sat in meditation until the first light of
dawn; then he rose from his seat and put away his
mosquito net. Glancing up, he saw the tiger still
stretched out comfortably, looking like some
oversized pet dog in front of its master’s house.
Eventually, the time for his daily almsround
arrived. The only way out of the cave went straight
past the tiger. He wondered what its reaction would
be when he walked by. As he put on his robes he
noticed the tiger looking at him with soft, gentle
eyes like a dog looking wistfully at its master.
Since he had no other alternative, he would have to
pass within several feet of it on his way out. When
he was ready, he approached the mouth of the cave
and began speaking to the tiger:

“It’s now time for my morning
almsround. Like all other creatures in this world, I
am hungry and need to fill my stomach. If it’s okay
with you, I’ll go out and get some food. Please be
kind enough to let me pass by. If you want to stay
on here, that’s fine with me. Or, if you prefer to
go off searching for something to eat, that’s all
right too.”

The tiger lay there listening to him
with its head cocked like a dog listening to the
voice of its master. As Ãcariya Chob walked past, it
watched him with a soft, gentle gaze as if to say:
Go ahead, there’s no need to be afraid. I’ve only
come here to protect you from danger.

Ãcariya Chob
walked down to the local village for his almsround,
but he didn’t tell anyone about the tiger for fear
they might try to kill it. Returning to the cave he
looked at the place where the tiger had been, but
there was no longer any sign of it. He had no idea
where it had gone. During the remainder of his stay
in that cave, it never came to visit him again.

Ãcariya Chob
suspected that the tiger was no ordinary
forest creature but rather a creation of the devas,
which is why it appeared so tame and unthreatening
the entire time it was with him. He felt a lot of
affection for it and so missed its presence for many
days thereafter. He thought it might return from
time to time to see him, but it never did. Although
he heard the sounds of tigers roaring every night,
he couldn’t tell whether his friend was among them.
In any case, the whole forest was teeming with
tigers. A faint-hearted person could never have
lived there, but he was not affected by such
dangers. In fact, the tame-looking tiger, who kept
watch over him all night, made him feel more
affection than fear. Ãcariya Chob said that
experience increased his belief in Dhamma in quite a
special way.

ÃCARIYA CHOB
SPENT five years living in Burma, where he learned
to speak Burmese as fluently as if it were his own
language. The reason he eventually returned to
Thailand concerned the Second World War. The English
and the Japanese were fighting each other all up and
down the countryside – in the towns, the villages,
and even in the mountains. During that period, the
English accused the Thai people of collaborating
with the Japanese. Consequently, they searched for
Thais in Burma, hunting them down with a vengeance.
They summarily executed any Thai they found inside
Burma, regardless of whether it was a man, a woman,
or a monk – no exceptions were made.

The villagers that Ãcariya Chob
depended on for his daily alms loved and respected
him; so when they saw the English soldiers being
very meddlesome, they became concerned for his
safety. They hurriedly took him deep into the
mountains and hid him in a place where they decided
the English would not be able to find him. But
eventually a contingent of English soldiers did come
across him there, just as he was giving a blessing
to a group of villagers. The villagers were
crestfallen. Questioned by the soldiers, Ãcariya
Chob told them that he had been living in Burma for
a long time and was never involved in politics. He
said that being a monk, he knew nothing about such
matters. The villagers spoke up in his defense to
say that, unlike lay people, monks had nothing to do
with the war, so it would be wrong to try to involve
him in any way. They warned the soldiers that,
should they take any action against him, it would
amount to hurting the feelings of the Burmese people
who had done nothing wrong. It would unnecessarily
damage relations with the local population, which
would be a grave mistake. They assured the soldiers
that he had been living there since long before the
war began and knew nothing about international
affairs. Even though their country was now in a
state of war, the Burmese people did not view this
monk as a threat of any kind. Thus, if the soldiers
were to harm him, it would be tantamount to harming
the whole of the Burmese nation. The Burmese people
could never condone such an action.

The contingent of English soldiers
stood talking among themselves about what to do with
Ãcariya Chob. After discussing his case for about
half an hour, they told the villagers to quickly
take him away to another location, for if another
army patrol came and spotted him, there could be
trouble. Should their pleas be rejected the next
time, his life might well be in danger. While the
soldiers were viewing him as an enemy, Ãcariya Chob
sat quietly, extending forth thoughts of loving
kindness and recollecting the virtues of the Buddha,
the Dhamma, and the Sangha.

When the soldiers had gone, the
villagers took him deeper into the mountains,
telling him not to come down to the village for
almsround. Instead, each morning they secretly
brought food for him to eat. From that day on,
patrols of English troops regularly came to bother
the villagers. Soon patrols were coming daily to ask
the whereabouts of the Thai monk, and it became
increasingly obvious that he would be killed if they
found him. As the situation worsened, the villagers
became more and more concerned for his safety.
Finally, they decided to send him back to Thailand
by way of a remote forest trail that passed through
thick mountainous terrain. This trail was known to
be safe from incursions by English patrols. They
gave him detailed instructions on how to proceed,
warning him to stick to the trail no matter what
happened. Even if he found the trail overgrown in
places, he was not to attempt a different route. It
was an old footpath used for generations by the hill
tribes that eventually led all the way to the Thai
border.

Once he had these instructions, he
began walking. He walked all day and all night
without sleeping or eating, drinking only water.
With great
difficulty he made his way through this dense
wilderness region teeming with all manner of
wild animals. Everywhere he looked he saw tiger and
elephant tracks. He feared he would never survive
his flight from Burma; he was constantly worried
that he might make one wrong turn on the trail and
end up hopelessly lost in that vast wilderness.

On the morning of the fourth day of
his trek to the Thai border, something incredibly
amazing happened to Ãcariya Chob. Please reserve
judgment on this incident until you have read the
whole story. As he crested the top of a mountain
ridge, he was so extremely hungry and exhausted that
he thought he couldn’t possibly go on. By that time
he had been walking for three days and three nights
without any sleep or food. The only breaks he had
taken were short periods of rest to alleviate the
physical stress of such an arduous journey. While
dragging his enfeebled body over the ridge, a
thought arose in his mind: I have walked the entire
distance to this point risking my life with every
breath I take, yet somehow I’m still alive. Since
starting out I’ve yet to see a single human
habitation where I could request alms food to
sustain my life. Am I now going to die needlessly
for lack of a single meal? I’ve suffered enormous
hardships on this trip – at no other time in my life
have I suffered so much. Is it all going to be in
vain? Have I escaped war, a sphere of death everyone
fears, only to die of starvation and the hardships
of this trek? If, as the Lord Buddha declared, there
really are devas in the upper realms, possessing
divine eyes and ears that can truly perceive at
great distances, can’t they see this monk who is
about ready to die at any moment? ? I do believe
what the Lord Buddha said. But are the devas, who
have received kind assistance from so many monks,
from the Buddha’s time until the present day, really
so heartless as this? If devas are not in fact
hardhearted, then let them demonstrate their
kindness to this dying monk so that their pure,
celestial qualities can be admired.

No sooner had this thought occurred
to Ãcariya Chob than something incredibly strange
and amazing happened. It was almost impossible to
believe. As he staggered along that remote mountain
trail, he saw an elegantly dressed gentleman, who
bore no resemblance to the hill tribes people of
that region, quietly sitting at the side of the
path, holding a tray of food offerings up to his
head. It seemed impossible! Ãcariya Chob was so
flabbergasted by what he saw that he got goose flesh
and his hair stood on end. He forgot all about being
hungry and exhausted. He was wholly astounded to see
a kind-looking gentleman sitting beside the path
about twenty-five feet ahead waiting to offer him
food. As he approached, the gentleman spoke to him:

「尊者，請在這邊休息一下，吃點東西，舒緩您的飢餓與疲憊。等你恢復體力，您可以繼續趕路。您今天一定能走出這片荒野。」

“Please, sir, rest here awhile and
eat something to relieve your hunger and fatigue.
Once you’ve regained your strength, you can continue
on. You’re sure to reach the other side of this vast
wilderness some time today.”

Ãcariya Chob
stopped, put down what few requisites he was
carrying, and prepared his alms bowl to receive the
food that the gentleman was offering. He then
stepped forward and accepted the food. To his
amazement, as soon as the food items were placed in
his bowl, a sweet fragrance seemed to permeate the
whole surrounding forest. The amount of food he was
offered by the gentleman was exactly the right
amount to satisfy his needs. And it had an exquisite
taste that was absolutely indescribable. This might
seem like an extravagant exaggeration, but the truth
of what his senses perceived at that moment was so
amazing as to be virtually impossible to describe.

When the gentleman finished putting
food in his bowl, Ãcariya Chob asked him where his
house was located. He said that he had been walking
for three nights and four days now but had yet to
see a single human habitation. The gentleman pointed
vaguely
upward, saying his house was over there. Ãcariya
Chob asked what had prompted him to prepare food and
then wait along that trail to offer it to a monk.
How had he known in the first place that there would
be a monk coming to receive it? The gentleman smiled
slightly, but didn’t speak. Ãcariya Chob gave him a
blessing, after which the gentleman told him that he
would have to leave since his house was some
distance away. He appeared to be quite different
from the average person in that he was remarkably
dignified while speaking very little. He looked to
be a middle-aged man of medium height with a radiant
complexion and behavior that was impeccably
self-composed. Having taken his leave, he stood up
and began to walk away. As he was obviously an
unusual man, Ãcariya Chob observed him carefully. He
walked about twenty-five feet, stepped behind a
tree, and disappeared from sight. Ãcariya Chob
stared at the tree waiting for him to reappear on
the other side, but he never did. This was even more
puzzling; so he stood up and walked over to the tree
to have a closer look – but no one was there. Had
someone been in that area, he would definitely have
seen him. But looking around in all directions he
saw no one. The strange circumstances of the man’s
disappearance surprised him all the more.

Still puzzled, Ãcariya Chob walked
back and began to eat his food. Tasting the various
foods he had been given, he found them to be unlike
the human cuisine that he was used to eating. All
the food was wonderfully fragrant and
flavorful, and perfectly suited to his bodily
needs in every possible way. He had never eaten
anything like it. The food’s exquisite taste
permeated throughout every pore in his body which
had so long been oppressed by hunger and fatigue. In
the end, he wasn’t sure if it was his extreme hunger
that made it taste so good or the celestial nature
of the food itself. He ate every last morsel of what
was offered, and it turned out to be exactly the
right amount to fill his stomach. Had there been
even a little extra, he would have been unable to
finish it.

Having eaten, he set off again
feeling incredibly robust and radiant, not at all
like the person who was at death’s door a short
while before. Walking along he became so absorbed in
thinking about the mysterious gentleman that he
forgot about the rigors of the journey, the distance
he had to walk, and whether or not he was on the
right trail. As evening fell, he emerged from the
other side of that vast wilderness just as the
mysterious gentleman had predicted. He crossed the
border into Thailand with the same feeling of joy
that he had been experiencing all day. The mental
and physical distress that had tormented him earlier
in his journey had disappeared after his morning
repast. When he finally crossed into Thailand, the
land of his birth, he knew for certain that he was
going to live.

He said that the strange gentleman he
met was surely a devic being and not one of the
local inhabitants. Think about it: From the point
where he met that gentleman to the point where he
entered Thailand, he encountered not a single human
habitation. The whole affair was very puzzling.
Ordinarily, one would expect to meet with at least a
small settlement of some sort along the whole of
that route through Burma. As it turned out, his
evasion of the army patrols had been so successful
that he had encountered neither people nor food. It
had been so successful that he had nearly starved to
death.

Ãcariya Chob
said that his almost miraculous escape from death in
that vast wilderness caused him to suspect the
involvement of divine intervention. Although the
wilderness he passed through teemed with dangerous
wild animals like tigers, elephants, bears, and
snakes, he did never encounter them. The only
animals he came across were harmless ones. Normally,
someone trekking through such a wilderness would
encounter dangerous wild animals daily, especially
tigers and elephants. And there was a very strong
possibility that that person might be killed by one
of those savage beasts. Surely his own safe passage
can be attributed to the miraculous properties of
Dhamma, or miraculous intervention by the devas, or
both. The villagers who helped him escape were very
concerned that he would not survive the threat posed
by dangerous wild animals, but there had been no
other choice. Had he remained in Burma, the threat
posed by the war and the English soldiers was even
more imminent. So opting for the lesser of two
evils, they had helped him escape from the land of
blood-thirsty people, hoping that he would survive
the savage beasts and enjoy a long life. Which is
why he was forced to make the perilous trek that
nearly cost him his life.

Please contemplate these mysterious
happenings for yourself. I have recorded the stories
just as I heard them. But being reluctant to pass
judgment on them alone, I would prefer that you come
to your own conclusions. Still, I cannot help but
feel amazed that something so seemingly impossible
actually occurred. Due to the rigorous nature of
Ãcariya Chob’s dhutanga kammaååhãna lifestyle, he
has had many other similar experiences, for he
always prefers living and practicing in remote
wilderness areas. Since he lives deep in the forest,
few people dare to go visit him, so his involvement
with society is very limited.